Celluloid Transmutations

The concept of gesture drawing has become a core exercise in academic drawing instruction since distilled by Kimon Nicolaїdes in the early 1940’s. This exercise involves quickly rendering the most essential composition of a form in space and time with little minimal regard to specificity. It attempts an end-run around artists’ self-conscious inner critic. As a drawing instructor, I have used this exercise numerous times and in multiple variations.

Celluloid Transmutations in the end result of combining this approach to rendering time-based subjects of repetitive exposure.

From 2009 to 2010 I repeatedly watched the film Casablanca in an attempt to parallel an experiment I was conducting on certain musical works that I was attracted to but simultaneously found incomprehensible. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand Casablanca, but that I thought it interesting to see what would happen to my perspective of a work of art within another medium with repeated exposure.

While intrigued with the time-lapse version of gesture drawings (i.e. sketching an athlete in action over several seconds) I found myself considering a long-running series of time-lapse gesture drawing of Casablanca over its entire duration. I have played with other variations on the approach including other films, size variations, and breaking the film down into scene-by-scene versions arranged stacked reminiscent of celluloid film strips.

All works are graphite on Clearprint vellum unless stated otherwise.